“Tongs,” Mia whispered to Benji, loud enough for me to hear, because Mia’s whisper was calibrated for theatrical effect rather than actual discretion.
“He puts out tongs for everything,” Benji whispered back. “The first time I tried to grab the bread with my hand, he looked at me like I was about to commit a felony.”
“Hands carry bacteria,” I said. “Tongs exist for a reason.”
“Tongs exist for salad and errant baby deliveries,” Benji said. “Nobody tongs a Milk Dud.”
“You’re welcome to use your hands. The tongs are an option, not a mandate.”
“He said mandate,” Mia whispered. “About candy tongs.”
“I’m sitting right here. You know I can hear you, right?”
During the film’s climactic scene, a sudden burst of sound from the screen sent Hiro into a brief anxiety spiral. I was on the floor beside him beforethe second note hit, my hand on his ribs, my voice dropping into the low register that told his nervous system the world was safe. Beside me, Dante reached down without looking away from the screen and placed his hand on Hiro’s back, adding a second point of contact. Hiro settled between us in under a minute, and neither of us acknowledged the coordination, because men who were good with animals recognized each other’s competence without needing to discuss it.
After the credits, the room erupted into the kind of discussion that happens when opinionated people have watched something worth arguing about. Jacks and I talked for ten minutes about the director’s use of negative space, which was the first conversation I’d had since Portland with someone who understood that what a filmmaker leaves out of a frame is as important as what they put in. Jacks thought about images the way I thought about animals, reading the empty spaces for information that the occupied spaces didn’t provide.
Rod said the movie reminded him of cooking, because the best meals were about what you left off the plate. Finn said it reminded him of running a bar, because the best nights were about what you didn’t say to a difficult customer. Chase said it reminded him of crosswords, and everyone looked athim, and he said, “What? Sometimes movies make me fall asleep.” Finn kissed him on the temple with the unthinking intimacy of a man who found his partner’s particular logic endlessly charming.
Dante said, “Tolstoy would have appreciated the pacing,” and returned to his book.
Mark, who had arrived late and let himself in without knocking because Mark treated all Barbacks-adjacent spaces as extensions of his personal domain, said, “The revenue model for Korean film distribution is actually fascinating.” The collective groan that followed seemed to genuinely confuse him, and, thankfully, stilled any future discussion of the international entertainment industry.
Dostoyevsky had slept through the movie and the discussion and was now draped across Hiro like a gray silk blanket. Hiro, who had started the evening trembling at the sight of this creature, was using him as a body pillow and snoring. Ruthie had migrated from Rod’s feet to my chair at some point during the film. I chose not to reclaim the cushion, sitting instead on the floor beside the couch.
General Tso had not descended from the refrigerator all evening, but his tail had been visible over the edge throughout the film, twitching at intervals that suggested he was either following the plot or maintaining a running count of the indignitiesbeing committed in his domain. During a quiet scene, I heard him purr. I could not prove this, and he would certainly deny it.
By midnight, everyone was gone except the mess.
Benji and I moved through the cleanup with the wordless coordination that two and a half months of cohabitation had built, a rhythm that didn’t require discussion. I washed. He dried. I collected bottles. He broke down boxes. I wiped the island while he swept around the dogs, who had collapsed into a pile near the couch that neither of us was willing to disturb.
The apartment was quiet again, but it was a different quiet than the one that had existed before the evening. It was the quiet that follows fullness, the acoustic memory of voices and laughter held in the walls like heat in stone after the sun goes down.
“That was okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
I searched for the word, the right one, the precise one, the one that meant what I actually felt rather than the one that kept a safe distance from it.
“That was good,” I said.
Benji’s face lit up in a way that I was learning to anticipate and that I was not, despite significant effort, learning to be unaffected by.
“Peter Loupier just admitted a social event in hisapartment was good. I want this in writing. No, I want a Post-it! A notarized Post-it.”
“Don’t push it.”
“I’m going to push it, push it real good.”
I groaned. A Salt-N-Pepa reference was well and truly out of bounds at midnight.
“I’m going to refer to this as ‘the night Peter admitted he likes people,’ and I’m going to bring it up at every opportunity.”
“I didn’t say I like people. I said the evening was good. Those are different statements.”
“You liked having Jacks at your bookshelf. You liked talking film with someone who knows film, which surprised me, by the way. Not you. Jacks. He played football. I thought the only negative space he understood was the grass between him and a quarterback.”
I chuckled as I wiped down the counter.
